Your drives will burn a DVD-RAM and pretty fast too at 12X. My LG comes back as a DVD-RAM drive in My Computer, so that shouldn't be a problem. You didn't say what stand alone DVD player you were trying to play the burned DVD in. What CD player were you trying to play a burned CD in?

The disks do have the lead in and out or they wouldn't work in your DVD burners.

Do a disk check on a DVD blank the next time you fire up Nero 8 and see if it's detecting the disk correctly. Are you using DVD+Rs to burn you movies? Nero can automatically set the Book Type to ROM if you allow it to do so. Setting the book type to ROM will give your burned DVDs greater compatibility with older stand alone DVD players.

My guess is that either you're not bit setting the blanks to look like ROMs and/or you have an older DVD player that just will not read a burned DVD.

It doesnt matter what stand alone player i use, a cd wont work on anything apart from my own computer. Im using the correct media types too and this is only a recent problem. my computer was able to burn discs a while ago but i have no idea what changes might have changed this.

Im running XP and don't have daemon tools installed. I tried reinstalling the drives themselves and this didnt work either.

Ok I've got a couple of ideas. You have the IDE header to spare so why don't you move the slave drive to the other header and make it a master. When you built your computer did you install all the VIA chipset drivers? Optical drives usually work best with the VIA IDE driver provided by Microsoft. Go into your Device Manager and right click the primary and secondary storage controllers and update their drivers. Reboot and then check to make sure that the driver is provided by Microsoft..